Federal statute law requires one-member districts.
It would require a constitutional amendment, which in turn would require 2/3 of the Senators to agree.
British were able to neuter the Lords with an act of Parliament, which only required a bare majority in the Lords.
And on two significant occasions (Reform Act 1832 and Parliament Act 1911), the Lords caved when it was made clear that there would be enough additional Lords created to make that majority - thanks to the [cough] monarch of the day, who would do so as "advised’ by a Prime Minister with a Commons majority from a general election on the issue.
And look at the end results. We’d have been better off if the states never united, or only the ones willing to accept a more federal structure from the start did. And above all, if we’d never let the slave states in.
Did you mean “more federal” as in states given greater latitude and de jure plus de facto sovereignty, or did you really mean “more unitary” as in more willing to be a fully subordinate administrative area under a powerful central government?
Assuming you really meant the latter, then yeah. US State-level sovereignty in a loose federation might, might have been a functional form of government in 1790. But not in 1990 and for sure not in 2090.
I agree that leaving the slave states out from the git-go would have been better. It was our original and ongoing sin that will never be expunged and never given up. Our country might not have been as powerful today if the USA and the (call it) CSA had had to share the central continent from 1776. But it would have been far more harmonious.
« more federal » is a slippery term. In some contexts it means a strong central government, and in others it’s in contrast to a unitary government.
You may want to double check your history there. The United States was formed when 13 slave-owning colonies rebelled in 1776, over ten years prior to the Constitution. We didn’t have peace until 1784. Slavery was well on its way out even in 1789, but there’s no way Pennsylvania, Massachussets, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire were going to break away from all the other states.
If the US had split up in the late 1780s, there is a very good chance that Britain would invade in the early 1790s.
~Max
Generally agree. The Southern states were important for their agricultural economy and trade. Moreover, they had key seaports at Charleston, Savannah, and most of all, New Orleans, which crucial to trade/commerce in the US interior.
Which would be better than what actually happened.
Except it wasn’t.
That’s debatable. Yes, Britain abolished slavery in its colonies thirty years before the US. But history is not so simple. That might not have happened if Britain could count on the Americans to put down slave revolts. I’m not sure if we would have ended up better or worse. It could have changed the outcome of the French Revolutionary Wars. It could have discouraged revolutions in Latin America. We could have a Boer situation in the 1860s American frontier. It could have changed the outcome of WWI. It could have changed the outcome of WWII. It could have changed the outcome of the Cold War. We could be looking at an alternative history where the dominant global powers are all autocratic states.
~Max
Isn’t that where we are now? US, Russia, China and India?
Mostly. The 1833 act did not include the territories of the East India Company, Ceylon, and Saint Helena. They were finished up a decade later. Brazil was the last major nation, in 1888.
Not to mention the vast amount of british wealth that poured into America for cotton growing might never have occured.
In the late 1700s and early 1800 slavery was going out. The price of slaves was dropping- $200 to $100 to $50, They knew improtation was about to be banned, and there was little opposition to that. The Founders that they saw the handwriting on the wall for slavery.
Then Whitney invented the cotton gin- which made removing the seeds easy and fast. But still the bolls had to be picked by hand. The demand fro slaves- and the numbers went way way up.
Eli Whitney's Patent for the Cotton Gin | National Archives.
The most significant effect of the cotton gin, however, was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for enslaved labor to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for enslavers that it greatly increased their demand for both land and enslaved labor. In 1790, there were six “slave states”; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the slave trade from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860, approximately one in three Southerners was an enslaved person.
Because of the cotton gin, enslaved people labored on ever-larger plantations where work was more regimented and relentless. As large plantations spread into the Southwest, the price of enslaved labor and land inhibited the growth of cities and industries
However, his most well-known patent – the cotton gin – also had the devastating effect of expanding the institution of enslavement; making it even more profitable. By 1850, cotton was 50% of our GDP, and a multi-billion dollar institution worth more than all the manufacturing and railroad companies combined… Impact on Enslavement
In 1790 there were six slave states in the U.S. By 1860, the number of slave states grew to 15 and more than one third of the U.S. Southern population were enslaved. During this time period, the enslaved population grew from roughly 790,000 to 4,000,000, and annual cotton production grew from around 2,000 bales to 4,800,000 bales. Approximately one million enslaved people were sold from northern states and the upper south to the lower south to meet the demand for producing cotton. This process became known as the internal slave trade. The internal slave trade became the largest forced migration in American history, and led to the destruction of numerous families.
Note that- at one time there were only six actual slave states. The number of slaves increased five fold. The price went up to around $1500.
The founding fathers were not able to see the invention of the cotton gin, and thus their very reasonable prediction that slavery would just wither away was wrong.
I never made the direct connection between the cotton gin and the growth of slavery, and I either forgot or never knew about “internal slave trade”. Thank you for the information!
~Max
Technically, there was nothing about the cotton gin that required slaves. It’s just that collecting the cotton bolls was hard, painful work, and the social structure has been conditioned to slavery and slaves doing the work.
But it can’t be denied that the outcome was the rejuvenation of slavery in the South.
Correct.
Today I made this comment in casual conversation:
Turns out the Russians won the Cold War in 2024. We just thought we won it in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Now they’ve got their man in the White House, their agitprop rules our political discourse, and it’s game over. We lost.
I had not thought of it that way until that sentence flashed into my head. But IMO it’s a much more real than fanciful take.
Huh, I always thought of the Cold War as one between philosophies / systems of government, not specific nations. Is that not the case? Because whatever the Russian government is right now, I’m pretty sure it isn’t communist/socialist.
Well, between power blocs defined by marxist vs non-marxist ideology. Quite a few staunch American allies over the 45 years of the Cold War were not exactly paragons of liberal democracy.
A lot of the people who rose up in the Right during the Reagan/Thatcher-era e.g. Gingrich wanted the “communist threat” to be gone just so their countries would no longer have to offer socialdemocratic conpromise policies as an alternative to rampant social darwinism and we could go back to the old values where Everyone Knew Their Place.
Perhaps truer to say the KGB, as the guardians and executors of power and force, won - irrespective of the nominal ideology dressing up the exercise of brute force (which, in the end, was what “actually existing” Leninism/Stalinism amounted to).